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Monday, December 12, 2005

Just back from an invigorating x-c skiing jaunt around our orchard and meadow. While pausing to catch my breath at the far end of the meadow I started thinking about the ivory-billed woodpecker rediscovery and the ongoing search. With all the emotion, wonder, hypotheses, anxiety, fear and loathing, political, scientific, and financial jostling for position, we still have very little in the way of facts, or actual knowledge, about the bird or birds that have been seen.

My thought was: If I could interview an ivory-billed woodpecker, what questions would I ask, and what would the bird's answers be?

The very first question would be:Where the heck have you been all these years?

and the follow-up:So, how did you avoid detection for most of the past four decades? There must've been some close calls....

I'll come back to this fantasy Q&A in future posts. Right now I'm thinking about how the bird might answer...

About Bill

Bill of the Birds

Bill Thompson III is the editor of Bird Watcher's Digest by day. He's also a keen birder, the author of many books, a dad, a field trip leader, an ecotourism consultant, a guitar player, the host of the "This Birding Life" podcast, a regular speaker/performer on the birding festival circuit, a gentleman farmer, and a fungi to be around. His North American life list is somewhere between 673 and 675. His favorite bird is the red-headed woodpecker. His "spark bird" was a snowy owl. He has watched birds in 25 countries and 44 states. But his favorite place to watch birds is on the 80-acre farm he shares with his wife, artist/writer Julie Zickefoose. Some kind person once called Bill "The Pied Piper of Birding" and he has been trying to live up to that moniker ever since.